In recent years, the adoption of computing devices such as smartphones, tablets, and game consoles has exposed many people to video games and graphical simulators. This is in part due to the network-connectivity offered by these devices, and the robust application ecosystems that support the download of video games, simulators, and other applications to these devices. As a result, video games have become a popular past-time for many people.
As a result of the interest in video games, the demand for video games has increased along with the demand for ever increasing levels of detail in terms of graphics, physics, sounds, and other features to create a more immersive environment. However, such increases in overall demand also increase the demand on computing devices used to execute the video games. This demand may be even more apparent in the online computing world where hundreds or thousands of players may be using gaming servers to interact with each other in a video game environment. Video game developers are placing increased loads on such centralized servers.
Further, video game and simulation developers and developers of other software applications are increasingly relying on public computing infrastructure, or so-called virtualized computing or “cloud computing”, such as may be provided by a service provider, in order to quickly and easily setup and maintain servers and systems for executing the games, simulations, or other software. Computing resources in a service provider environment are commonly used to provide services, storage, and the like, and these computing resources are often scalable to adjust to rising or falling demand. However, video games and similar software applications have been less able to easily transition to scalable solutions that are available from computing service providers.